How to Make the Mezcal and Scotch Cocktail

The Guillotine is as good an example as any of the bizarre magic of cocktails. The experience of the drink is composed, elegant even, a sophisticated push and pull subtlety and counterbalance, but the list of ingredients reads, to me, to be almost flamboyantly random. It’s like Cocktail Mad Libs. The Guillotine has four ingredients, and even if I told you three of them—a strange assembly of scotch whisky and mezcal, accented with honey—how long would it take you to figure out that the fourth is banana? How many guesses would you need? A thousand?

The Guillotine is a creation of Franky Marshall. She has worn many hats during her time in the industry, both literally and metaphorically, and is at this point less of a bartender than a cocktail personality: After working at some big-name bars in New York and winning and then judging cocktail competitions, she has been on the education staff of the prestigious Beverage Alcohol Resource, and recently has been most visible emceeing several cocktail and bar shows, like North American 50 Best Bars and the Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Awards. A native New Yorker but fluent in both Spanish and French, she is vivid in both personality and style, and so when it came time to choose someone to open Le Boudoir, a Marie Antoinette-themed speakeasy in Brooklyn in 2016, she was the natural choice. Her then-employer cited her as “the only Francophone cocktail aficionado who was known to cosplay as the doomed last queen of France.”

It was there she created the Guillotine, a head nod, so to speak, to what ended up as the (spoiler alert) final chapter of Antoinette’s life. It is an Old Fashioned, essentially, put through the fun house mirror. To start, mezcal, the earthy, vegetal, smoky agave spirit, is joined in an unlikely split-base with a blended scotch, which gives a malty depth to the mezcal’s brighter, rawer flavor. To this, a small touch of honey, a classic flavor pairing with scotch (if not with mezcal), which rounds the edges. And then, banana liqueur, just a quarter ounce, which not only works but really works, the most demure role I’ve seen banana yet play and the factor that makes the Guillotine truly remarkable. The banana flavor appears on the palate slowly, as if out of a fog, from absent up front to a murmur in the midpalate to boldness on the finish, where it combines with the vegetal notes of the mezcal and makes the whole project both fascinating and delicious. 

What’s fun about the Guillotine is that any single description you can give of its character is only partially true. It’s a banana drink, but it’s an Old Fashioned. It’s a mezcal drink, but there’s also almost as much scotch whisky, used here as a modifier as much as a base spirit. It’s soft and round, but there’s enough raw smoke from the mezcal to add ample personality. It’s bizarre, but refined. It’s a cocktail magic trick, but it’s easy to make at home. Try it and see.

Guillotine

Add all ingredients to a mixing glass, add a lemon peel to the glass, then add ice and stir for 15 to 20 seconds. Strain over fresh ice into a rocks glass and garnish with another lemon peel (or 2).

NOTES ON INGREDIENTS

Lemon Peel(s): This is my only tweak on the original, and it’s a subtle one: Marshall called for a single lemon peel, and I feel like the drink wants more than one. Stirring with a lemon peel is a nice way to add more personality. It’s not strictly speaking necessary, but I believe it helps.

Mezcal: The more personality, the better. You want an artisanal mezcal, ideally something between 42 to 50 percent alcohol. Beware generally of 40 percent mezcal: Diluting down to 40 (a.k.a. 80 proof) is industry standard in tequila and vodka and rum, but mezcal’s identity is still a wild spirit and as a rule of thumb, the distilled to proof ones tend to be better (where they just pull it off the still and put it straight into the bottle, no dilution needed). My go-tos for cocktails are the Siete Misterios Doba-Yej, Del Maguey Vida, and Banhez, but if it’s priced well and is the right strength, it will likely be fine.

Blended Scotch: You’d think there’s already smoke so why not add more smoke, but it doesn’t work. Adding peat smoke turns this cocktail ashy. Just use your regular, unsmoked blended (or blended malt) scotch, something like Great King Street Artists Blend, Monkey Shoulder, Famous Grouse, or even the readily available Dewars, Chivas, etc.

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Honey Syrup: We turn honey into a syrup so we can use it in cocktails, as raw honey hardens into an unmixable rock when it touches ice. To do so, mix honey with warm or hot water and stir to combine, in the ratio of 3:1 (if measuring by weight, i.e. 6 oz. honey to 2 oz. water) or 2:1 if measuring by volume (i.e. 6 fl.oz. honey to 3 fl. oz water). 

Banana Liqueur: The gold standard is either the Giffard Banane du Brasil, for lighter, brighter banana notes, or Tempus Fugit Crème de Banana, which tastes more like banana bread. I admit I’ve only been able to try this cocktail with the former, which is amazing, though I strongly suspect the latter would work as well. And just as a final note—I realize this is only 0.25 oz. of banana liqueur, but if all you have is a trashy low quality banana “schnapps” or 99 of them or something, I’m not sure I’d try it here. It might work, but a cocktail is only as good as its weakest link, and I’d just point out that there’s nothing in the world so useless as a bottle of banana liqueur that ruins every drink it touches.